Be Exceptional

Five Principles for Becoming Exceptional

Joe Navarro, Toni Sciarra Poynter

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780063025400
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

"Anyone pursuing success must read this book."—Chris Voss, author of Never Split the Difference

A master class in leadership from the world's top body language expert

From internationally bestselling author and retired FBI agent Joe Navarro, a groundbreaking look at the five powerful principles that set exceptional individuals apart

Joe Navarro spent a quarter century with the FBI, pursuing spies and other dangerous criminals across the globe. In his line of work, successful leadership was quite literally a matter of life or death. Now he brings his hard-earned lessons to you. Be Exceptional distills a lifetime of experience into five principles that outstanding individuals live by:

Self-Mastery: To lead others, you must first demonstrate that you can lead yourself.

Observation: Apply the same techniques used by the FBI to quickly and accurately assess any situation.

Communication: Harness the power of verbal and nonverbal interaction to persuade, motivate, and inspire.

Action: Build shared purpose and lead by example.

Psychological Comfort: Discover the secret ingredient of exceptional individuals.

Be Exceptional is the culmination of Joe Navarro's decades spent analyzing human behavior, conducting more than 10, 000 interviews in the field, and making high-stakes behavioral assessments. Drawing upon case studies from history, compelling firsthand accounts from Navarro's FBI career, and cutting-edge science on nonverbal communication and persuasion, thisis a new type of leadership book, one that will have the power to transform for years to come.

Chapter 1
Self-Mastery
The Heart of the Exceptional

By crafting our own apprenticeships, understanding ourselves through honest reflection, and cultivating key habits that lead to personal achievement, we lay the foundation for an exceptional life.

Everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks about changing himself.

—Leo Tolstoy

One of the toughest decisions I ever had to make as a SWAT team commander took place before the operation even began.

As a team commander, you’re responsible for the operational plan and the skilled and safe execution of that plan. Once you receive the “green light” for the operation to begin and are fully geared up, weapons locked and loaded, and you say over the headset, “I have control, I have control, I have control,” many people are counting on you to have your head in the game. The public expects it. So do your superiors. And your fellow SWAT team members need you to have laserlike clarity of thought, as their safety and the success of the operation depend on it.

Events were unfolding fast in this particular operation—an armed fugitive holding his girlfriend hostage in a run-down motel outside Haines City, Florida, vowing never to be taken alive. Normally the hostage negotiators can deal with events like this, but this hostage was in need of medicine and her life was in peril. With little time to lose, the heat of the day making tempers even more testy, and the suspect unwilling to cooperate in any way, the last thing I needed was to have one of our FBI SWAT operators not up to the task. This particular operator wasn’t as quick with his questions, nor was he finessing the final plans as swiftly as he usually would. Issues that he would normally raise—such as building construction (to determine how far a stray bullet might penetrate); whether the hinges on the door faced out or in (to help us determine how to open the door and what kind of breaching tools we might need); how close we could place an ambulance without it being seen; the location of the nearest hospital with a Level I Trauma Center, and so on—weren’t coming up. His head, I could tell, wasn’t in the game. Finally, I told myself: You have to address this, and quickly. We didn’t have time to explore the cause. I just knew something was going on with him, and I had to take action.

My superiors, in the heat of the moment and busy with decisions that needed to be made by management—dealing with FBI Headquarters, last-minute changes, and making sure local law enforcement was aware of what we were about to do—hadn’t noticed, though we’d been in the same room. But as team commander, I couldn’t ignore it. This SWAT operator was not himself. It was the worst of times to have to deal with a personnel issue—and perhaps no one would notice, so long as I kept it to myself and nothing went amiss in the operation—but I had noticed, and it was on me to resolve. I couldn’t have someone like that going into an operation where the potential for a firefight in an urban environment was high and decisions would have to be made quickly. As a leader you cannot put others at risk if you can easily avoid it, no matter how badly someone wants to be a part of something important or, as in this case, had been critical to the planning of this intricate operation to make a fugitive arrest and rescue a young woman with medical issues who, according to her family, was being held against her will.

I went to the Special Agent in Charge, who was on the phone updating FBI Headquarters on unfolding events, and said, “I need to take one of our operators out of this mission.” As I said the words, I realized that in my two decades on SWAT, this had never happened before.

“You do what is best,” was all he said, his trust in me having been well established over the years. Then, as if sensing I had more to say, he signaled to me with a nod. That’s when I said, “I need to take myself out of this operation, sir.”

At first he just stared at me for a second to make sure he had heard right, his hand covering the phone receiver, putting Washington on hold. He scanned my face, and in that brief moment, I believe, he began to realize what I had been experiencing that day.

He asked if I was sure. I said yes. “Do what you need to do. Do what is best,” he repeated, without hesitation. “I trust your judgment.”

And with that, I took myself out of a major SWAT operation. This was not easy to do, as my second-in-command now had the burden of assuming my role, and I knew some of the SWAT operators would wonder what was going on. Regardless, it was what was needed, and as team commander, it had been my duty to make the call.

The operation went down without incident and no one got hurt.

What had been affecting me? In the end, with some introspective prodding, what should have been immediately obvious eventually percolated to the surface. My grandmother had passed away a week earlier, and I was still under the effects of that profound loss. I was still grieving, still in pain—even though I thought I could just work my way through it. To others perhaps I looked a little more stoic than usual, maybe joking less, but when we’re busy, it’s easy to overlook what others are experiencing emotionally. My emotions were affecting my thinking. Fortunately, I recognized it in time.

That Special Agent in Charge said something important: “Do what is best.” But how do we know what is best to do? And then how do we do it? It begins with self-mastery.

Self-Mastery Defined

We often equate mastery with skill. Skill, we say, is what underlies the ability to build a Stradivarius-quality violin or chisel a magnificent statue. But mastery and skill are two different things.

To become skilled at something requires dedicating yourself to whatever the challenge may be, no matter how difficult—but more importantly, it requires self-mastery: focus, dedication, industriousness, curiosity, adaptability, self-awareness, and determination, to name just some of self-mastery’s skills.

I start with self-mastery because it is foundational to mastering the other four traits that set exceptional individuals apart. The good news is that self-mastery is not an impossible quest. We can actually rewire our brains to bring better versions of ourselves to the small and large things we do every day.

If, as I believe, our lives are defined by what we think—the mind-sets and attitudes we adopt and the knowledge we acquire—what we feel, and the things we choose to do each day, then we cannot achieve our full potential without self-mastery.

Self-mastery may not conquer mountains, but a mountain cannot be conquered without self-mastery. The fastest human to ever live, Usain Bolt, did not achieve that status merely on athletic ability. He achieved it through self-mastery: he learned, he sacrificed, he worked hard, he remained diligently focused. Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, did the same thing. This is what it takes to achieve that elite level shared by the exceptional.

But there’s another side to self-mastery that includes knowing our emotions, our strengths, and more importantly our weaknesses. By knowing ourselves, we know when others should take the lead, when today is not our day (as happened to me on that SWAT operation), when we need a dose of humility, need to confront our demons, or take some other action to call forward the power of our better selves. That is what self-mastery allows for—a conscious and honest appraisal of ourselves that can compel and support us to strive and try harder, and to grasp the nuances of awareness that can make the difference between failure and success.

In this chapter, we’ll explore how to take command of your life through your daily habits and behaviors by focusing on how to build the scaffolding essential to self-mastery, ending with a series of self-assessment questions to help you in your journey toward this most essential capacity. You want to reach your potential, grow your influence, grow your brand? Self-mastery is the only way.

Apprenticeship: The Scaffold of Knowledge

Sometime during high school, I had a sobering self-reckoning. It was not imposed on me. No one sat down to talk to me about it or suggested it. It was a very private conversation I had with myself, because it was abundantly clear to my young mind that things needed to change.

Fleeing to the United States at the age of eight as a refugee after the Cuban Revolution had left me at a tremendous disadvantage. Coming to the United States abruptly, not speaking English, not understanding this totally new environment with different rules, customs, and norms had left me bewildered and lagging. I was several steps behind and always trying to catch up in my new world. We arrived in America with no money (Cuban soldiers at the airport made sure of that) and traumatized, having survived a very violent communist revolution in Cuba. As a new arrival I had to fit in, yet the only thing I had in common with the children around me was that, like them, I loved to learn and play sports. They did not speak Spanish and I did not speak English. They had not been through a bloody revolution. They had not been there on the street during the Bay of Pigs Invasion as I had, nor heard the gunshots of the paredón (the wall) where soldiers would line up citizens and summarily execute them for being anti-Castro. They knew Tinkerbell, Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Disneyland, and the Mouseketeers; to me these were names with no meaning. I was used to wearing a uniform to school; they wore jeans and T-shirts. I went from being in a classroom with one teacher all day to changing classrooms every fifty-five minutes—why, I wasn’t sure. I knew the rules of baseball but had never seen a basketball. I loved this new game I was introduced to called dodgeball, but I hated to be called up to the board to do math problems.

It was culture shock as defined by Alvin Toffler. I tried hard to learn all the social rules: no talking in line, hold hands while crossing the street but don’t touch otherwise, don’t stand too close, don’t gesture too much, don’t talk too loud, raise your right hand if you need to pee, make more eye contact with the teacher when being reprimanded (the exact opposite of what I had been taught, which was to look down, avoid eye contact, and look contrite). There were endless differences I had to learn and overcome to fit in. But there was also the matter of the schoolwork. During the revolution it was not safe to attend school and frankly it was scary, so I was already behind academically when we fled Cuba. Now, on top of that, nothing the teacher said made any sense because it was in English.

Somehow, through sheer persistence and out of necessity, I became fully fluent in English in about a year. There is nothing like immersive socializing for learning a language. I had been put back a grade so I could catch up academically, and in time I made up two years in one. But that was only the beginning.

There was the issue of my accent. I had to work hard to get rid of it because one thing I learned was that if you speak with an accent in America, you stand out, and I so wanted to fit in. Eventually I was able to overcome my accent, but there was always the reality that there was so much to learn that my classmates knew that I didn’t know: all the things we learn from toddlerhood on, on the playground, while watching TV, by att...